Presumably anyone with a brain and a clear conscience can see that Dibble did not characterize my views fairly. So: no, that is not “clearly” right and not right at all.
Then what did you mean by “That claim about Muslims” in reference to** iiandyiiii**'s post, (which I presume is what you were replying to, since you posted after him and didn’t quote any other post)? Because that’s the only “claim about Muslims” he made in his entire post.
If you feel you’re being unfairly mischaracterized by me (not that I characterized, I asked for clarification), perhaps you can explain this better. What words in iiandyiiii’s post, exactly, form “That claim about Muslims”? Or are you referring to some earlier post?
Anyone else with “a brain” and “a clear conscience” is also free to enlighten me as to what “claim about Muslims” they thought you were saying was “truly bizarre” and “weird”, since it’s so clearly obvious (but not what I asked it was.)
I went back and reread it and I’m also not sure what you meant, if not what Dibble said.
Sigh.
It is Andy’s assertion that for Muslims generally (meaning all of them, I guess? Most of them?), their religious faith is one of their “most superficial characteristics”. This is the kind of thing you can accurately say about most mainline Protestants and many Catholics. You cannot say it about, say, Southern Baptists or Dutch Reformed parishioners, and you certainly can’t say it about the vast, vast majority of Muslims.
The label “Muslim” is a superficial characteristic. It says very little about someone – any more than “Jewish” or “Christian” or “Hindu”. Beliefs among all those who identify as such for any of those (and many more) vary incredibly widely. There’s no way you could possibly know the depth and breadth of belief for “the vast, vast majority of Muslims”.
FWIW that makes more sense, but was definitely not hard to miss. Hence why me and Dibble missed it.
I also don’t think it’s absurd to assume that for many Muslims, their beliefs are as mutable or superficial as more secularized Christian sects. I don’t believe this because it simply doesn’t fit my lived experience. Basically none of the Muslims I’ve personally met fit easily into a box.
Also that isn’t how I’d read iiandyiiii’s statement either, so ymmv.
I’d love to see Andy tell a bunch of randomly selected Muslims that their Islamic faith is one of their “most superficial characteristics”.
Actually, try this thought experiment. What if a popular TV show or movie had a character who expressed this viewpoint? How controversial would that be? How much more so if the assertion was put in the mouth of a Muslim character?
Now imagine it’s being said by an Episcopalian instead (about their own affiliation). Same thing? C’mon.
It’s a label. Plenty of Muslims have very strong beliefs. Many of them have very strong conservative beliefs; many have very strong progressive beliefs; many have very strong beliefs that are a mix; many have beliefs that are not so strong. The label itself tells us very little about what they believe.
And yet you’re casting aspersions on hundreds of millions based only on this label. And you’re saying it’s about their beliefs… but that’s bullshit, because you know very little about the beliefs of these hundreds of millions of people, other than that they identify as Muslim.
It’s the simplest form of bigotry – mass negative judgment based on a superficial characteristic. If it was about belief, you could specify the belief – “belief that violence must be used against unbelievers”… I’d have no problem with being wary, or casting negative judgments, on those with that belief. But that’s not what you’re doing – you’re using the superficial label, for no discernible reason whatsoever aside from bigotry.
Feel free to cite polls… polls in countries with little or no tradition of free speech, in which citizens might have little idea whether they’re speaking to a government/religious agent or a media pollster. And feel free to ignore polling in the US (which does have that tradition of free speech) that shows American Muslims are generally more welcoming, tolerant, and progressive than America Evangelical Christians and Mormons.
People are people. There really is nothing special about Islam or the Koran. It’s just another religion and just another religious text. I’m not a fan of religion, but these aren’t unusual examples of either. For various reasons of geopolitics, in the present Islam is highly concentrated in a few regions with a combination of poor economies and oppressive governments. This really tells us nothing about the religion or its adherents.
Right. Religious belief is “superficial” in this sense in that the label doesn’t let you predict all that much about what the individual thinks about things like justifications for violence. It does not mean that the person’s religious identity isn’t central to their life or identity as a whole.
Islamophobes would benefit greatly from reading some scholarly works about Islam to appreciate the breadth of belief among people who identify as Muslim.
Nice spin, but actually it does mean that. Whatever: it’s tangential to the main point, because I’m not primarily concerned with their attitudes toward violence. I’m much more concerned with their attitudes about sexuality, particularly the sexuality of women and gay men.
Did you come late to the discussion and miss my link to my tweet about Steve King? Those Dutch immigrants have not been notably violent AFAIK, but we should have kept them and their extreme conservative religious views out of the country regardless.
I took a 400-level history course about the history of Islam, that our professor said was equivalent to a graduate seminar, from a respected historian who was himself Muslim. He was one of the open-minded types you’re talking about, as he responded to my atheism by lending me his copy of the book Mohammed, by the Marxist (and atheist) French historian Maxime Rodinson. (Someone publishing a book like that nowadays would have to go into hiding if they didn’t want to end up like the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.)
It’s funny how het up you guys get to attack me and my supposedly vile bigotry. I had a rider in my car last night who insisted that even after the 2008 crash, anyone who really wanted to work could have found a job. So I asked him why the unemployment rate had dropped so much in the years since then. “It’s because of one man”, he answered. I interjected “yeah, Obama” (I couldn’t help myself) and he angrily shot back “Fuck that [n-word]”. I told him that kind of language wasn’t appropriate, and he apologized, but he had revealed himself to be a true bigot regardless. Get some perspective, people.
Oh wow a 400 level course.
Me too. Life is pretty shitty if you’re a woman or gay in some majority-Muslim countries. That is the result of many factors, and ideologies related to Islam are certainly one of them. It still doesn’t make it true that learning someone’e religious identity is a good way of predicting their beliefs about, say, feminism. It has some predictive power, of course. But in the same way that knowing you’re a middle-aged white dude in America has some predictive power about your beliefs about Islam–i.e., not that much.
Cool. Not sure if that course would cover the kind of thing I’m talking about or not. It would depend a lot on whether that history includes the last hundred years. Ira Lapidus’s History of Islamic Societies was really eye-opening for me. It’s more a textbook than a sit-down-and-read book, but if you’re interested in the subject I highly recommend it.
There we go, would that have been so fucking hard to type in response to my question in the first place?
Another quick question, if you would, just to establish a baseline here - how many Muslims do you actually know well? As in, would call at least an acquaintance, if not a friend?
That wasn’t really my claim, anyway. My claim is that the label “Muslim” is a superficial descriptor (i.e. it tells very, very little about someone). There’s some subtlety there, but that’s very different than saying that their religious faith is superficial.
Yeah, anyone should have gotten that, since you explained it. In the very next sentence.
But Slack is not exactly known for his reading skills (400-level courses notwithstanding :rolleyes:). There’s a good reason he gets his daily hatefuel in podcast format.
I’ll do you one better.
What can you reasonably assume about the following people based on the fact that they are Muslims and my relationship to them?
[ul]
[li]Ms. Halim, who works up in Software[/li][li]Bilal and Oni, old buddies of mine[/li][li]My stepfather Albert[/li][li]My two former classmates in high school[/li][li]My former math TA[/li][/ul]
See what you can do. How many true claims can you make about any of them? How many true claims can you make which apply to all of them? Let’s see.
No, he is not.
It is funny he thinks himself intelligent, but engages in the sloppy hero-worshipping and the oral parroting of the mediocre intelligence looking for the justification. It is in keeping with his bigotry of course.
Why you bother to ask him any questions I do not understand, you know the response will be the empty posturing and claims.
Mostly, it amuses me - how inept he is at evading real answers while practically breaking his own arm patting himself on the back for his cleverness.
I’ve realized over the past few years that compliments people give to themselves are almost always false. Folks usually only give themselves compliments when it’s a protest or a prophylactic* against an expected insult.
So if you tell me you’re not a racist, or not sexist, or that you’re very smart or very nice or have a great sense of humor, it’s almost always because you know that, absent your declarations to the contrary, I’m gonna believe that you’re a racist sexist stupid asshole with a sense of humor like a year-old raisin.
Problem is, if that’s what I’m gonna think without your protestations, that’s what I’m gonna think with your protestations, too.
Folks who are actually smart don’t spend much time telling anyone. Folks who have great senses of humor don’t need to make that declaration. And so on.
- Prophylactic: something used to cover up a dick
Ask yourselves what is actually implicitly conveyed in endlessly repeated protestations that are all variations on the theme “so-and-so is nothing, they don’t matter, no one cares”. :dubious: